Honor Flight honors veterans

Subheadline:

Widespread program flies World War II vets, others to see national monuments.

Four Lowcountry World War II veterans - three sailors and a soldier - will finally get to see the monument dedicated to the 16 million men and women who served in that war.

Ralph "Ditt" Dittenhoefer, Ralph C. Fields, Robert "Bob" E. Mollman and James "Jim" E. Knight will join several other veterans in the region on an Honor Flight Network expedition to Washington, D.C.

The men will travel at no cost to them, thanks to a retired U.S. Air Force captain who wanted to make sure World War II veterans got to see the monument that was finally built and dedicated to their service. Earl Morse in 2004 came up with the idea to fly veterans on private planes and escort them around Washington.

From the first dozen volunteers until now, nearly 40,000 veterans have made it to see their monuments.

Knight, 89, joined the Navy in Reidsville, N.C., and served as a ship's cook and butcher. The Beaufort resident served on sub chasers in the South Pacific.

"We were chasing submarines - it was a small wooden ship, 110-feet long, 60-foot wide with two 500 horsepower General Motor engines; it chased submarines and had depth charges," Knight said in detail. "You didn't get any breaks day or night, so you didn't have much else to remember. It was an exciting time. We spent two years in the South Pacific in a combat zone."

Knight was already able to fly, having earned a private pilot's license, so after two years his supervisors let him go to flight school.

"I flew amphibian airplanes to look for submarines, which was more efficient than the boat. Had a lot of fun doing that," Knight said. "We got along fine. Didn't lose any men during those two years I was on the ship. And I haven't seen one of those souls since then, about 70 years ago and I would love to see them."

Mollman, 84, currently lives on Hilton Head Island. He entered the Navy in Western Springs, Ill., and was a third class petty officer. His tour was a little quieter as a U.S. Navy radar technician and instructor for 18 months in Great Lakes, Ill., and Corpus Christi, Texas.

"I've never seen that monument. I've seen some of the older ones," Mollman said. "I went to the Vietnam one a year or two after it was finished."

Dittenhoefer, 84, entered the Navy in San Diego, Calif. The Bluffton resident retired from the Navy as a chief petty officer. He started out as a seaman recruit, trained as an aviation ordnanceman handling weapons for aircraft and retired as an aviation electronics technician, serving primarily on aircraft carriers and at aviation commands.

There was not a lot of free time aboard the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30), a small aircraft carrier.

"I remember being on it for two or three years and most of the campaigns that took place during that time, that CVL fought more battles and steamed more miles in combat in 1945 than any other CVL, CVC or CVE in the fleet," Dittenhoefer said. "We were at sea the majority of the time without interruption with either the Third or Fifth Fleet in every operation in the Pacific, from Marcus and Wake Islands, around the Marianas and then into Okinawa.

"We pulled into some piles of sand and were given two beer chits to go have some fun," he said, "but they weren't anything notable as I can recall."

With all of the ordnance he would have loaded into attack aircraft, it is not surprising that Dittenhoefer also did not recall one specific incident over another. After all, who could predict that a young pilot assigned to the ship's squadron would be forced to bail out of his aircraft, spend several hours in a life raft awaiting rescue from the lifeguard submarine, USS Finback, and one day become President George Herbert Walker Bush?

"I didn't even know he'd been shot down," he said.

Getting shot at was something Fields didn't like.

Fields, 85, entered the Army in Gainesville, Ala. The St. Helena Island resident was a staff sergeant and served in China, Burma and India, seeing combat in the Burma Campaign.

"It was good and bad. That's about all you can say," Fields said. "Any time you're being shot at is bad. I've had a few of those. I was behind the Japanese lines a good bit in Burma. We ran into a few ambushes and it's not good at all. We were behind the lines for about 90 days. I don't really talk about that too much these days."

Fields served in a unit that trained Chinese soldiers.

"We went there in April of '45 and we trained Chinese until the end of the war. That was right interesting. We trained them in combat. I was trying to teach them about firing mortars," he said. "I was with two or three different outfits there. One outfit was a well-educated division. You could tell them something one time and they'd pretty well have it. And others you could talk until you were blue in the face and they'd never get it."

Just before the end of the war Fields and his unit were moving down to the front. He was in charge of moving heavy weapons and spent three days in truck convoy before loading them onto boats in the river. It was more than a cruise downstream.

"The last night on the boat, we were at a little village and this other fellow and I went up on the bank and walked down the main street. There was this big building there like a courthouse with archways," Fields said. "We weren't carrying any weapons. And as we walked through the arches, there wasn't any sound at all in the village the whole way we were walking. But the hair stood up on the back of our necks. I said to my pal, 'Let's get the heck out of here.' Come to find out that there were a bunch of Japanese holed up there in that village and we walked right through them. That was interesting. Everything turned out all right.

"The other boys back at the boat, they'd been swimming and they saw two or three dead Japanese floating by so that ended that swimming party."

Fields has been disappointed that the monument to his fellow World War II veterans had not been built before now, there being several other tributes to more recent conflicts instead. But it doesn't diminish his one desire to join his fellow on the flight.

"Well, main thing I want to see is the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier," he said.

Knight is also eager to see the monuments and to reflect on his experiences.

"The four years that I spent in the Navy was the best education that I could have ever had. It was exciting times and part of the world we had never seen," he said. "I think it would be interesting after all of these years. Nobody has had much to say about World War II veterans until the last year or so. I've heard more compliments and whatever going on to honor us in the last year than I had heard in the last 65 years.